The best of the UK is being attacked by our own government, and, once
destroyed, it will not easily be repaired

We all know what Britishness is supposed to be about, don’t we? Tea-drinking, class consciousness, potato crisps, world-beating pop music, the Royal family, queuing, imperfect teeth and a preoccupation with the Second World War and the weather. But these things are, of course, merely the icing on the fairy cake; the true substance lies elsewhere.

The stuff of Britishness that really means something, at least to people in other countries — who gaze at it with the wistful eyes of those to whom such things are not guaranteed — lies in our reputation for high professional standards, fairness, and the general absence of corruption in public life. We might be tempted to snort at that, perhaps remembering the details of the MPs’ expenses scandal, but the mere fact that it was a scandal at all proves the point.

In numerous other countries, bribes and unearned official perks are rarely a national scandal, because they are an accepted fact of life; the thick grease of institutional corruption clogs every aspect of an individual’s relationship with the state.

What are we known for? There is the British Army, internationally respected for its discipline and quality of soldiering. Then there is our criminal-justice system, in which any ordinary person accused of a crime can have access to a highly trained advocate. There is also our free and outspoken press, which has long held the powerful to account in a style that journalists in Russia, for example, would regard as a distant dream.

Such institutions are far from perfect, of course, as the phone-hacking scandal demonstrated; there has, for too long, been a kind of pointless rapacity in some quarters of the British press for tearing relatively inoffensive public figures to shreds. Yet the criminal activity in one part of our press was none the less exposed by another section of it, an offending newspaper was closed, there was a lengthy inquiry, and those journalists with charges to answer have been placed before the courts. In its own way, the system has worked.

The real scandal now is that what foreigners, rightly, regard as the best of Britain is being systematically and simultaneously attacked by our own government, and – once destroyed – it will not easily be repaired.

The Coalition is regarded by many people as a fuzzy, consensus-led government that – with the possible exception of Michael Gove – broadly shies away from overt ideological change. The combination of Cameron, with his Love Actually air of patrician reassurance and Clegg, with his Europhile ineffectuality, has lulled us into a false sense of security. The truth is that the Coalition is quietly weakening or shattering the core institutions that have served Britain successfully for so long. Where there is professional excellence, our Government seems determined to bring mediocrity and worse.

The Ministry of Defence, for example, is on course to axe the jobs of 20,000 highly trained and battle-hardened soldiers by 2020, planning to replace them with 30,000 reservists. The idea is to save money, but it’s proving hard to recruit the reservists. And the Government has taken recruitment away from the Army and turned it over to a private company, Capita, under which applications have plummeted.

Meanwhile, the sense of crisis at the criminal Bar cannot be exaggerated. Chris Grayling, the first Lord Chancellor who isn’t a lawyer, is now intent upon slashing advocates’ legal-aid fees still further, by up to 30 per cent. It’s not a question of cutting food for fat cats; some experienced barristers can no longer support their families, and many juniors — saddled with debt and struggling on salaries too small to live on — are leaving the profession. The Criminal Bar Association’s website describes it as “this time of unparalleled challenge to our survival”. The Bar will become a hobby for those with private incomes. High-street solicitors and barristers will go out of business; we are heading towards a criminal-justice system run on the lines of a fast-food franchise.

Finally, there is the free press, currently being exhorted to sign up to an amorphous yet unpredictable Royal Charter. Those newspapers that refuse, it is widely reported, may be obliged to pay the complainant’s costs in libel cases whether they win or lose. Again, vague but menacing, and inherently unfair.

The Army, despite deep internal disquiet, will continue to follow orders (its disillusion will be demonstrated in recruitment), but it may yet prove a strategic error for the Government to take on both the press and the criminal Bar at precisely the same time.

This Coalition is not a government that commands loyalty, but it sure likes to swing the wrecking ball. Perhaps it’s time that those who still care about what Britain was, is, and will be, got together and started to push it back.

Mercurial Bowie needs no award

So David Bowie didn’t win the Mercury Prize last week. Instead, it went to a young singer-songwriter called James Blake, who was graceful enough to answer, when asked how he felt about beating Bowie: “I don’t think I beat him… David Bowie’s an inspiration to people like me.”

Nor did Bowie, who was nominated for his new album, The Next Day, appear to take the award very seriously. He declined to attend, but dispatched a self-recorded film of his song Love is Lost, which reportedly cost £8 to make.

While such awards are helpful to artists at the beginning of their careers, they are largely superfluous to those who have made it.

As the recent V&A exhibition devoted to Bowie proved, the gangly, mesmerising Bromley boy, who once seemed almost entirely composed of sculpted bone and crowded teeth, has, with his mixing of performance, personae and pop, ingrained himself indelibly in the British consciousness and can’t ever be eradicated from it.

It is quite common for the most original British talents to be left out of major awards: Richard Burton was nominated seven times for an Oscar and never won once, and nor did Alfred Hitchcock. Indeed, the longer Hitchcock waited, the shorter his anticipated response became. By the time he won his consolatory honorary Academy award in 1967, it had shrunk to: “Thank you… very much indeed.”

Yes, that’s journalism, Mr Coogan

The comedian and actor Steve Coogan, a leading light in the Hacked Off campaign for press regulation, co-wrote and stars in a superb new film, Philomena, as the former BBC journalist Martin Sixsmith, who helped an elderly Irish lady, Philomena Lee, track down her lost son, given away for adoption by nuns 50 years earlier. It features Sixsmith repeatedly confronting people who don’t want to talk to him, trailing a frail, elderly nun into her private quarters and, on one occasion, jamming his foot in the door of a householder who has clearly asked him to go away. If Philomena is the heroine, Sixsmith is the hero.

Last week, Joan Smith – a journalist who sits on the board of Hacked Off – argued on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that reporters who don’t leave a property as soon as they are told to should receive harsher penalties. Well, yes, within reason – but perhaps, as Sixsmith was, they are trying to get to the heart of wrongdoing. Funnily enough, the people involved in such activities will go to great lengths to conceal them, including vocally pleading press harassment.

Everyone is agreed that the press needs stronger regulation against flagrant abuses (although the current operation of our criminal law in such cases seems pretty robust). But journalism, particularly investigative journalism, is precisely that: an investigation, not a pre-sealed deal. The reporter perpetually discovers new facts, never fully knowing what the outcome will be, perhaps offending people along the way, perhaps – God forbid – even taking a couple of wrong turns.

Mr Coogan is, I think, one of the most talented British actors and writers of our era. But, in real life, he sometimes seems to lack the imagination of his own script.